The 50 best TV shows of 2018: No 9 – Atlanta
Donald Glover had a busy 2018. He starred as Lando Calrissian in Solo: A Star Wars Story, and he announced his departure from the animated Deadpool series by releasing a satirical script mocking Hollywood’s tone-deaf tendencies on race. He later produced the most talked-about music video in years for This Is America. But arguably his most impressive feat was following up the first season of Atlanta, his quirky examination of African American life, with something just as ambitious and odd.
Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) – the on-the-cusp-of-making-it rapper who seems to be in a constant state of incredulity – spends most of the second series being mugged while running into his city’s strangest residents. There’s comedian Katt Williams playing Alligator Man, an urban myth come to life. The episode Barbershop features Bibby, a flakey coiffeur intent on doing anything other than cutting hair. Then, of course, there is Teddy Perkins, the Michael Jackson-like recluse who Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) encounters while picking up an organ in an episode that hits similar notes to Jordan Peele’s Get Out.
A sense of unease permeates throughout, as hinted at by the show’s subtitle, Robbin’ Season, which refers to the period before Christmaswhen robberies in Atlanta spike as people cash in on other people’s yuletide splurges. “You might get your package stolen off your front porch. While we were there, my neighbour got her car stolen from her driveway,” explained Stephen Glover, brother of Donald and a writer on Atlanta. “It’s a very tense and desperate time. Our characters are in a desperate transition from their old lives to where they’re headed now. And robbin’ season is a metaphor to where we are now.”
Glover and his writing team shared a Slack channel where they would send each other memes, viral videos and news stories that caught their attention. From there, ideas were turned into stories that Henry, Glover and crew played out. They definitely saw the viral video posted on Facebook in 2016 by an outraged suburban mother who had just heard the Vince Staples song Norf Norf and cried as she recited the line “Folks need Porsches, hoes need abortions”. They pulled that apart in acerbic fashion. An episode starts with a white woman reciting Paper Boi’s lyrics (“Shout-out Colin Kaepernick!”) while crying, which the crew credit with giving them more radio play. It is typically dismissive and irreverent, and you get the feeling Glover and co don’t want to get bogged down in the earnest art of “explaining black culture to white America” like some of their other contemporaries have.
The unusual pacing means they get to explore more interesting terrain. There is a flashback episode to Earn’s youth (FUBU), a trip to an Oktoberfest beer hall (Helen), a disastrous gig on a college campus (North of the Border). But the series standout, along with Teddy Perkins, is Woods, an episode ostensibly about what happens to Paper Boi after a date goes awry and he ends up being mugged, again. But as he escapes into a forest the episode transforms into something between the Pine Barrens episode of The Sopranos, Under the Skin and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Paper Boi is chased by a very persistent hobo.
Glover said the series was inspired by the animated Tiny Toons film How I Spent My Vacation. “It’s a whole story, but told in a bunch of little parts,” he said. Atlanta continues to be greater than the sum of its parts, taking a story about a rapper and his lacklustre manager and turning it into a surreal experiment that acts as a measured critique of contemporary America and internet culture.